'I was Lancelot,' I tell her, no longer sure whether I am speaking Arabic or Turkish or Russian. 'It was magnificent.' I spin around, managing just one half-turn of a pirouette а la seconde before losing my balance.
The Queen takes my arm, frowning with concern. 'You need help,' she says, earnestly, and I don't need to know what language she's speaking to understand.
'It's this damned veil,' I explain, apologetically. 'I can't see a thing through it.' I pull away from the woman's grip and start gathering the folds of cloth, trying to pull the burka over my head. 'Why the hell didn't you stop wearing them when we died?'
I know that's unfair, the Queen of England wasn't wearing a burka -what was she wearing? A round hat, with flowers. I try to apologize, to tell her how much I like her hat, but the cloth is muffling my voice and I give up. 'I give up!' I let the cloth drop, and turn to the Queen to let her know I give up.
Lights, in the corner of my eye, through the lace. I'm in the street.
'I'm in the street!' I yell. 'These fucking veils!'
There is a screeching of tires. Someone grabs my arm, and I remember something from elementary school.
'The rate of pedestrian traffic fatalities in Kabul, in the fourteenth century of the Hegira -' I start to say, and all of a sudden, before I can finish, I am on my back, flat on the ground, the wind knocked out of me. Smell of bruised grass. City lights above me in the night. Women's voices, all around me.
'Is she hurt?'
'Someone call an ambulance!'
The lights rush in on me, expanding to fill all the world.
I can hear them, though I am blind.
'Temperature forty point five,' the hospital's doctor says, sounding as though she's talking into a microphone. 'Heart rate one-ten. Blood pressure…'
'Perhaps it's some kind of autoimmune reaction.' Another woman's voice, a familiar one. Beautiful Arabic, like a scholar.
'Maryam?' I croak.
Her hand on my forehead, strong and cool. 'Dr. Orbay called me,' she says. 'They found her address in your bag. Hush now, Yazmina. I'll take care of you.'
The hospital's doctor is talking over her. '…one-fifty over eighty. If you're right…' I imagine the doctor shaking her head. 'There's not much we can do here except try to get her stable. Maybe they can do something for her off- planet.'
Through my closed eyelids I see the arch again. An accelerator ring, a jumping-off point for starships. Hippolyta's was destroyed at the start of the quarantine. But there it is. Not a place, so much as a gateway.
To where?
I think of Lancelot again, halted at the door of the Grail Chapel, granted a glimpse of what he would never touch.
The nurses strip me, wash me, wrap me again in what are probably soft felt blankets, though they feel like steel wool against my fevered skin. I wait for some reaction to my anatomy-shock? outrage? disgust?-but it never comes.
A needle pricks my arm.
I can almost sleep.
I was wrong to define my own history as real, Hippolyta's as unreal-to define mine as Self and Hippolyta's as Other. That is what the inference engines were trying to tell me.
There is no past that is not in some sense a lie. We see the past through the distortion of memory and imagination. We collaborate in its conscious distortion through history and propaganda. We see the laws of cause and effect violated not only each time a starship bends space-time but also each time we view the incomplete records of the past with our teleological modern eyes, imbuing them with presentiments of the future that is our own present, a thing which itself we never see or understand except as imperfect fragments. We tell ourselves that we search for truth when what we are concerned with is in fact nothing more than plausibility.
I called Hippolyta's history virtual, but that is semantics. Whether the causal anomaly created that history, or whether it only connected us to something that always existed, somewhere, somehow-is probably not even a meaningful question.
The women of Hippolyta have a story they tell about themselves, and it does not include men.
That I exist is enough to prove the story false.
That Hippolyta exists is enough to prove the story true.
I am the flaw in the calculation, the hidden assumption that invalidates the proof.
That is why I am dying. To balance an equation.
'Hush,' Maryam says, in Arabic, as she lays a damp cloth across my forehead. I must have said some of that aloud.
'Not long, now,' I whisper. When the end comes, it will come quickly.
I wonder what would happen if Liwen were to launch her rockets from here. Would Lieutenant Addison and the Tenacious still be waiting? If not-if the rockets, launched, would find themselves in some other space-time altogether, rotated through some set of higher dimensions-what would that mean? That Hippolyta is as much a Gordian knot from this side as from the other?
If the knot is ever untied, it will be untied from this side.
'Little daughter,' Maryam says. 'Hush.'
And does that other side exist? Did it ever? How would I prove it?
I try to remember the name of the prophet in the Qu'ran, the one whose sister the Jews and Christians called Maryam. The name of the woman I met in the Erewhon transit hostel, the maker of kinйs. She brought the Bani Israil out of Egypt, but died on the banks of the Jordan. If I was to take a name it should have been that one, and not Yazmina.
Maryam puts her hand in mine. I try to remember if she knows that I am a man.
'Hush, little daughter,' she says again.
Son, I try to say, but the word is already slipping away from me.
The Clockwork Atom Bomb by Dominic Green
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
'Over here, mister. This is the place.” The girl tugged Mativi’s sleeve and led him down a street that was mostly poorly-patched shell holes. Delayed Action Munitions - the size of thumbnails and able to turn a man into fragments of the same dimensions - littered the ground hereabouts, designed to lie dormant for generations. Construction companies used robot tractors to fill in bomb damage, and the robots did a poor job. Granted, they were getting better - Robocongo was one of equatorial Africa’s biggest exporters. But usually the whites and the blacks-with-cash sat in control rooms a kilometre away directing robots to build the houses of the poor, and the poor then had to live in those houses not knowing whether, if they put their foot down hard on a tough domestic issue, they might also be putting it down on a DAM bomblet a metre beneath their foundations.
This street, though, hadn’t even been repaired. It was all sloped concrete, blast rubble and wrecked signs telling outsiders to keep out this goverment building! field clerical stores! important goverment work here you go back!
“Come on, mister”, said the phaseuse. “You will see, and then you will have no problem paying.”
“You stand still,” commanded Mativi suddenly. “Stand right there.”
Nervously, he reached into a pocket and brought out the Noli Timere. It only worked fifty per cent of the time, based on information gathered from scientist-collaborators from all factions in the war, but fifty per cent was better
